I can't wait to bore my grandkids to death with tales about Steven Gerrard.

Billy Liddell was my grandad's idol. Liddlepool they called the team, apparently. It'd only take a whiskey before he'd repeat stories from the 40s and 50s about how the former soldier was "as strong as an ox."

When his dad used to take him the games, Liddell would bang goals in with both feet from all angles, apparently. A one-club man, who scored 228 goals in 492 games over 15 years.

Despite being a Red, my grandad would also harp on about Dixie Dean and Tom Finney, who always had the ball glued to his feet, he claimed, again and again.

Fast forward a few decades and his son, my dad, still goes on about the "unstoppable" Shankly sides in the 70s. He once met Bill and put a Liverpool scarf around his neck, apparently.

I've heard that story a hundred times. He lived around the corner and would knock on his door every week. "Is Bill playing out?" he'd ask, only to be met with a polite "No sorry lads he's working," from his wife Nessie, "But here have some biscuits."

Shankly would name the same team every week, he'd say. Clemence, Lawler, Lindsay, Smith, Lloyd, Hughes, Hall, McLaughlin, Heighway, Toshack and Thompson.

The names still roll off his tongue like rehearsed times tables. And now they're lasered into my brain too.

Then it was "Dalglish," "Keegan" and "Rush." They were world-class magicians with the ball at their feet, apparently, helping Liverpool dominate England and Europe, bringing home trophy after trophy.

Only, like my entire generation, I've never seen any of them play, apart from in grainy black and white footage on YouTube.

To me they were just stories, part of Liverpool folklore and might as well have involved fire-breathing dragons and knights rescuing princesses.

But seeing Stevie G smash in screamers against Olympiacos in the Champions League, West Ham in the FA Cup final, captain Liverpool to a commanding 4-0 win over a galactico-ridden Real Madrid and beating Barca in their own backyard, are all stories I was lucky enough to experience and see happen. In the flesh.

On his day he was unstoppable and on every other day he'd carry Liverpool through the mud, only to come up carrying a gleaming Champions League trophy.

That team in 2005 featured bang average players like Djimi Traore and Igor Biscan - but he'd transform them into world beaters standing on the shoulders of a giant.

At 6ft 2 he'd fly into tackles with Roy Keane, morph into a superhero when playing against Everton and in important games, drag Liverpool by the scruff of the neck over the line. Just when it mattered.